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I'm 23, building my first startup with $0. Roast my plan

2 points| dattapt | 18 days ago

Hello everyone,

I am a 23 years old trying to build my first startup. This is day 1 of my startup.

Firstly I always wondered if we can learn by playing and experiencing with the concepts, not just reading boring explanations. So I thought why not build a platform people can post interactive experiences rather that boring lectures. The only things you need to know to create a post is your domain knowledge and plain english. And sharing an interactive experience is as easy as sharing a picture or video.

Second thing I noticed their are many valuable information in people's replies on social platforms like youtube, reddit, X etc but many people wrote same thing again and again. Now if there are 10 or 20 reply then you can read it but say there are 1000+ replies then it takes too much time to read So I thought why not build an extension which will categorize all replies and give me all the key points by I will able to understand what people actually want.

These are my two ideas so far.

I am good in building stuff but have no knowledge about sales and marketing stuff. By reading some reddit posts I understood market before launch is very good for success. So I thought I'll spend 70% of my time on marketing and 25% on building and 5% sharing the journey on every platform.

So for day 1 I did this: - I build two landing pages with waitlist for both of my projects. - Did a very few of the development work for the platforms. - Cold mails about 50 investors among them got only 2 replies that "They are not interested".

For day 2 my plan is to: - Send cold dms to atleast 200 people mainly youtubers and teachers about my platforms and 50 more investors. - And do few more development work.

My goal is to get at least 10 people on the waitlist by the end of this week. Roast me. I’d rather hear it now than waste 6 months.

If you are interested in the journey: https://pjourney.netlify.app/

6 comments

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verdverm|18 days ago

Interactive is hard

1. People prefer reading and watching

2. Getting interactions to work well across platforms is going to have your agents endlessly spinning their wheels

Cold emails are not marketing, that is more often considered sales, or even more so spam. Waitlists are largely meaningless. Don't try to talk to investors until you have users using the platform

Your best strategy is to work on a problem you have in a domain you already deeply understand. If your picking be cause it looks like you can make money, you will fail.

Focus on problems, not solutions, which need to be flexible

jones1618|18 days ago

At minimum, you have to provide a snapshot/example of what you're building.

I'm most intrigued by your comment pile digestor. I've often wanted something like that while cruising the Internet but I'm not sure how'd you monetize it. In the commercial world, software for analyzing customer-submitted questions and comments has been a valuable service for a long time, even before AI/ML engines came along. So, that's useful but it's a hard problem, very domain-specific.

Anyway, as others have said the main things you have to do to attract interest/business are: 1) Explain specifically what pain you are solving for what specific user/customer, 2) Offer specifics (examples, features) of how you solve that pain better than anyone else.

toomuchtodo|18 days ago

Ship early, ship often. Waitlist is a sign of interest, use and the willing to pay you is success outcome criteria. Optimize for success, get and remain close to the user customers. Wishing you success.

You will learn the market by shipping and aggressively iterating on customer feedback.

dattapt|18 days ago

Thank you so much for the feedback. Really means a lot.

gusmally|18 days ago

Who are your competitors? What makes you different?

dattapt|18 days ago

I actually did not find any competitor in this space. There is no platform which analyze comment or where every post is interactive.